Do you remember life before the internet?

I remember life before instant “Anything.”

I was thirty-four when the world changed forever, though we didn’t know it at the time. That’s when most people started talking about something called the “World Wide Web,” though it would be years before it touched my daily life in any meaningful way. I did purchase a personal computer with a 40 megabyte hard drive and a 1200 baud modem. I really thought I was something.

Before then, we lived in a different universe entirely.

When I needed to know something—really needed to know it—I had three options: ask someone who might know, go to the library, or remain curious. There was no instant gratification, no typing a question into a search box and getting ten thousand answers in half a second. If the library was closed on Sunday and nobody in my circle knew whether Morocco was larger than Algeria, that question would just have to wait until Monday.

The phone rang, and you answered it blind. No caller ID, no screening. It could be your mother, a telemarketer, or your crush from high school. The anticipation was delicious and terrifying. We memorized phone numbers—dozens of them—and kept little address books with carefully written entries in different colored inks as relationships began and ended.

Getting lost was a real possibility. I kept folded road maps in my glove compartment, their creases worn soft from opening and refolding. Before a trip to an unfamiliar place, I’d call ahead for directions, writing them down on whatever scrap of paper I could find: “Take 95 North to Exit 12, turn left at the Shell station, we’re the blue house third on the right.” Sometimes the directions were wrong. Sometimes the Shell station had been torn down. Sometimes you drove around for an hour looking for that blue house.

Boredom was different then—deeper, more complete. Waiting at the doctor’s office meant staring at year-old magazines or watching dust motes dance in the afternoon light. No scrolling, no games, no endless stream of content. Just you and your thoughts, whether you wanted them or not.

We made plans and kept them because changing them was nearly impossible once you’d left the house. “Meet me at the fountain at 7 PM” meant exactly that—no “running 10 minutes late” texts, no last-minute venue changes. If someone didn’t show up, you waited, wondering if they’d forgotten or if something terrible had happened. One thing was for certain, your word meant something back then.

I miss the mystery of people. You couldn’t Google someone before a first date, couldn’t scroll through their photos or investigate their entire history. People revealed themselves slowly, in conversations and shared experiences. Everyone had the chance to reinvent themselves, to escape their past, to be known only for who they chose to be in the present moment.

The evening news came on at 6 PM, and that was when you learned what had happened in the world that day. Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather would tell you what was important, what you needed to know. There was no 24-hour news cycle, no constant stream of updates and opinions and breaking news alerts. The world felt both larger and smaller—larger because distant places remained truly distant and mysterious, smaller because the information that reached you had been carefully curated and shared by everyone.

We were alone with our thoughts more often. Driving meant listening to whatever radio station came in clearly, or nothing at all. Walking meant noticing the world around you. And I did a lot of walking back then. Waiting meant daydreaming. There was space for the mind to wander, to make unexpected connections, to be genuinely surprised by its own creativity. It was a great time to be a writer.

I don’t romanticize those days—they could be isolating, frustrating, inefficient. But there was something precious about living in the moment, about accepting uncertainty, about the slow reveal of knowledge and relationship and discovery.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go back, just for a day, to that world where information was scarce and precious, where mystery was common, where being alone with your thoughts wasn’t a luxury but simply the way things were.

But then my phone buzzes with a message from my daughter with a video of my granddaughter who lives three thousand miles away, and I remember that every age has its gifts.